Tao Ruspoli

The Pilgrimage to the Black Rock, 21st Century, Landscape Photography

2016

About

'The Pilgrimage to the Black Rock' (Burning Man) Edition 2/10, 20x30cm, 2016, Color-Print, printed on Velvet Watercolor, 310gsm, Bright White, Acid Free, Signature label and Certificate.
About
Tao Ruspoli (born 7 November 1975) is an Italian-American filmmaker, photographer, and musician.
Background
He is the second son of occasional actor and aristocrat Prince Alessandro Ruspoli, 9th Prince of Cerveteri by Austrian-American actress Debra Berger. Tao was born in Bangkok, Thailand and raised in Rome and Los Angeles. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy.
Career
Moviemaker magazine singled out Ruspoli as one of the 10 Young Filmmakers To Watch in its spring 2008 issue. His feature narrative debut, Fix, was one of 10 feature films to screen in competition at the 2008 Slamdance Film Festival and soon afterward at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival where Ruspoli was awarded the Heineken Red Star Award for 'most innovative and progressive filmmaker.' Fix also won the Festival Award for Best Film at the 2008 Brooklyn Film Festival, Vail Film Festival and the 2008 Twin Rivers Media Festival, as well as other prizes at several international festivals. His most well-known documentary is Just Say Know, a personal discussion of his family's drug addiction. His other films include Flamenco: A Personal Journey, a feature length documentary about the flamenco way of life as it is lived by Gypsies in the south of Spain. He has directed a number of other short documentaries, including El Cable (also about Flamenco), and This Film Needs No Title: A Portrait of Raymond Smullyan (a portrait of the renowned logician, mathematician and concert pianist Raymond Smullyan). Tao founded LAFCO in 2000. The Los Angeles Filmmakers Cooperative, is a bohemian collective of filmmakers and musicians who work out of a converted school bus. Through LAFCO, Tao has produced several films and helped dozens of filmmakers to make their first films and discover the wonders of digital media. His producing credits include the feature film Camjackers, which he also acted in and co-edited. Camjackers won the best editing award at the 44th Ann Arbor Film Festival. Tao is an accomplished flamenco guitar player, and his first CD, FLAMENCO, was released on Mapleshade Records in 2005. He married actress Olivia Wilde in 2003. They divorced in 2011. He currently lives and works in the High Desert, California. He is the co-founder of the Bombay Beach Biennale.
The Exaltation of Imagination
Photographs and Musings in Defense of Burning Man
by Tao Ruspoli
The press around Burning Man had gotten so bad that I almost felt embarrassed to be going this year. Even Daniel Pinchbeck, famed psychonaut and burner par excellence, had written a thoughtful piece explaining why, after 15 consecutive years, he wasn’t going back this year: the festival had changed too much-the rich had taken over, it had gone from a relevant and fascinating social experiment to epitomizing the worst elements of capitalist excess. Besides, he seemed to be saying, the world is going through too many crises, both ecological and humanitarian, to justify the extravagance of an event like this.
Keith Spencer wrote in Jacobin that rich libertarians are now the only ones who love Burning Man because it had 'never had a radical critique at its core.' Various exposes of made-to-order camps funded by tech billionaires told tales of exploited “sherpas” who were being badly paid and mistreated while building camps for their bosses to indulge in the most superficial hedonic play, all in an environment totally inaccessible to anyone but the most privileged class, those few who could afford the luxury to spend a week fucking off in the desert. Add to that, my ex-girlfriend kept reminding me how passe’ the entire style of the place was—all that steampunk and electronic music, and those elaborate costumes are 'just so 90s'. And here I was, almost 40, sheepishly heading, if the articles I was reading were to be taken seriously, to some silly rave in the desert who’s heyday had long passed.
But it’s fun, that’s why I’m going. That’s what I kept telling myself…that’s the only reason I’m going—for a good party.
This year 70,000 people made the pilgrimage to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to spend a week at the Burning Man festival.
I’ve been going to Burning Man almost every year since 2001. Back then, I’d just bought an old school bus on eBay, ripped out the seats, outfitted it with 3 digital video editing stations and set out to create what I thought was a unique and original idea: The LAFCO Bus (LA Filmmakers Cooperative) was meant to travel the country with a group of independent filmmakers on board who would make films and share their resources with strangers in an attempt to mix art, technology, community, nomadism and an attempt to live and work outside the confines of traditional media making, all the while encouraging others we met along the way to do the same.
I was surprised and delighted to land on the playa (the name burners give to the black rock desert, the flattest expanse of North America, where the event has taken place since 1990), for the first time a few months later, and to discover nearly 25,000 like-minded individuals gathered in one place. That’s an understatement—I was in a state of heavenly awe. My school bus was nothing compared to the things I was seeing out there!
There were other buses that had been turned into 17th century galleons, elaborate sculptures and extraordinary nomadic architecture dotted the vast dry lake bed, and mutant vehicles transported people across this seemingly extraterrestrial landscape. And the vastness itself was so astonishing. None of the photo’s I’d seen captured the sheer expanse of the place. It felt as if 25,000 artists, techies and media makers had landed on the moon and had been told they could do anything and everything they wanted. And what they wanted was magnificent: that is, to exalt the imagination above all other concerns, to turn those figments of their imagination into actual things, to share them with each other, and then to engage in deep conversation, challenge social conventions, and take a breather from the countless distractions and banalities that filled their lives the rest of the year back on Earth.